Perhaps the most pressing question any business can ask is, “Where do we go from here?”
This is particularly true of multinationals – those companies that are so large that they seem untouchable. Maybe they feel that way, too.
It gives one pause, however, to remember just how few firms of have managed to stay in the Fortune 500 since it was founded in 1955.
According to Mark Perry, Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Michigan, 87% of them have disappeared due to mergers, privatization, or loss of revenue, including bankruptcy.
How could that happen? How is it possible that the largest companies in the world could simply vanish?
Steve Jobs, quoted by Steve Denning in Forbes, tells us: “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it . . . [Then] the company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.”
And that’s exactly what we saw in the recent financial debacle. The largest of companies took their eyes off of the ball and instead succumbed to the pressure for sales, and ultimately for profits.
That means that the size of a company, an alleged source of competitive advantage, failed to bring any of them long-term success they intended.
What lessons can you learn from their mistakes? How can you avoid having regrets of your own?
Here are five ways:
1. Revisit your vision . . . often.
When you are so big that you have few competitors, it’s all too easy to believe that you’re invincible; that no one can touch you.
That view often leads to complacency and then carelessness – taking risks that would not have even been considered when you were smaller.
Companies risk losing their vision when they take their success for granted.
2. Implement your strategies.
This seems obvious, as well as easy. But the fact remains that companies do not achieve their planned results because they fail to put their strategies into practice.
3. Evaluate your long-term plans with long-term metrics.
Strategy, by definition, is a long-term. But a dangerous assumption has crept into its execution; and that is that more measurement is equal to better management.
Constant evaluation, however, causes people to do only those things that meet those short-term goals.
This is one of the primary sticking points that hold companies back. They fail to chart the results that support their strategies, and instead measure their tactics.
4. Re-design your internal structures to that they enable your company to be more flexible.
Chain-of-command, for example, prevents vital information from being communicated to the people who need it the most and at the time that they need it and avoids building in bias that will affect your decisions.
5. Get Executive Coaching
There was a time when coaching was considered to be a kind of novelty – much the same way as workplace teams.
In recent years, however, many have come to realize just how valuable executive coaches can be.
Many so-called coaches only assess your situation, and then offer a few insights into what they think you should do.
The best ones, however, do much more than that. They show you how to get the results you want, and they hold you accountable for your actions.
This added “personal touch” is something that many coaches shy away from; and that probably is because the lack the expertise to give you the help you really need – something that would become all too apparent in a close business relationship.
Vision, strategy, metrics, and flexibility are all necessary for businesses to be successful. But, if you want to take your business to the next level, then you owe it to yourself to get an executive coach who has the expertise to get you there.
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